Sharpen up your teeth, your dreams are more than worth defending.

When you go in for psychiatric counseling before your weight loss surgery, most doctors will warn incoming patients about 'transference'. The majority of us aren't eating food because we're hungry or because it tastes so damned good, we're eating because it fills a hole inside of us. We feel lonely or inadequate or anxious or stressed, and so we use food and the chemicals it triggers in our bodies to make ourselves temporarily feel better. And sometimes it even works for a few minutes at a time, tricking us into thinking that it doesn't matter if we're single or had a bad day at work or got kicked off the soccer team or flunked a test because we have cookies.

So what happens when they take that away from you? When the surgeon cuts your belly and removes the gland that makes you produce a hunger hormone, when you get sick if you eat more than four ounces at a time, when the smell of a Twinkie makes you feel like puking? Then what do you do to tamp down all of those emotions that are now running through you like the beasts in Where the Wild Things Are?

A lot of post-weight loss surgery patients become alcoholics. Some of them become addicted to exercise and the endorphins it kickstarts in your body; doing crunches until you feel dizzy can produce the same amount of happiness as a cupcake, supposedly. Some people just try to find ways to 'cheat' their diet, sneaking bites of ice cream or chocolate or drinking flat soda even though they know it's bad for them simply because it's the only comfort they're used to.

My mother died a little over a year ago; a year and one month, actually. She was forty-seven and beautiful and vibrant and had a contagious laugh and she never met a stranger. She was the last person in the world who deserved the hand she was dealt, at least in my life, and she went out like someone snuffing a candle. All of that beauty and light and goodwill and joie de vivre took to the sky and vanished, leaving only her imprint on the people who knew her.

I have built up a family around myself, a family of incredible friends who I can count on for anything, but in the process I have also lost touch with a lot of people who I thought would be there for me forever. My grandmother has sunk so deeply into her own depression at losing both her husband and her daughter to cancer in the same year that she hardly resembles the woman she used to be; she is beaten-down, quiet, doesn't even like to get dressed most days. She stares at the TV for days on end and gets only a few hours of sleep a night. In May I was given an award from my school, named Marketing Student of the Year; she didn't attend because she didn't want to get out of her armchair and get dressed for the ceremony. A lot of my friends have pulled away, unsure of how to deal with me now that my mother's gone. She was the buffer, the catalyst, the skeleton key that could open any door. I am simply me and for some people, that's game-changing. We're not a matched set anymore and so I am damaged goods, the leftovers.

Not everyone knows this, but my mother was a hoarder. She had a major shopping compulsion and she maxed out multiple credit cards on collectibles, dolls, toys, everything she saw on QVC or Home Shopping Network that caught her eye. She had every note anyone passed her in high school; she kept all of the drawings and stories and report cards I ever brought home. She had over forty photo albums cataloging her memories. She was afraid of losing things, of losing people. She surrounded herself with as much as she could in an effort to wall herself in.

Now that she's gone, I was left with a huge house... full of things. Three large bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, two bathrooms, and a kitchen overflowing with items my mother used to fill the holes in her life, the transference she was suffering from being a single, lonely mother.

I've had multiple garage sales and countless trips to Goodwill, had friends come in and buy bulk items for their own craft projects or collections, and sold dozens of batches' worth of things on eBay. And yet every time I turn around, there's another closet full of Rubbermaid totes full of Barbies or Pez dispensers or Matchbox cars or Ty Beanie Babies or clothes or shoes or purses. She had four Rubbermaid totes full of purses, no joke.

Some of the stuff's been easy to pack up, to sell off, to put away; I have very little emotional attachment to some of her belongings, like the McDonald's toys or the Pez dispensers. But then there are other things, like love letters she received in high school from boys who had crushes on her, and old diaries, and her satin letter jacket from school, that I just can't bring myself to get rid of and those things I keep and sometimes I find myself sitting on the floor reading her journals and crying. I wear her class ring on my right hand and her sneakers are the ones I wear to the gym and everything I do, I have that undercurrent thought of Is she with me right now? Is she proud of me? Is this how she'd want me to handle this?

If I hadn't had the surgery, I would be even bigger than I was, probably pushing 400 by now easily. I would be crying while I ate ice cream and lay on the couch for hours. Instead I don't have that option, so I go to the gym and do crunches. I run on a treadmill even though it hurts and I'm not very good at it. The other day I ran so hard that my heart rate spiked to 190 after 30 seconds of running, and my trainer made me stop to cool down. We think that I might have mild tachycardia (they found a shadow when they did my EKG pre-surgery but said it was minor enough that I didn't need to worry about it; however, I get extremely short of breath easily, not just winded but dizzy/faint with lack of oxygen and I never feel like I get enough air when I'm running). But the gym makes me feel like I'm in control of myself, that I can focus on the sound of breathing and the thud of my heartbeat and the gross sweat-slick feel of my skin instead of being here in a catacomb of memories and loneliness. I come home to a vacant house to a huge empty bed and a cat; at least he's here when no one else is. It gives me a reason to come home.

No, my transference has been running and not on the treadmill. I threw myself into my best friend's movie, possibly even biting off more than I should've tried to chew for my first time out of the gate; I helped with the script, I produced the majority of the budget, I chose the wardrobe and am responsible for laundering it, maintaining it and bringing it to set each shoot, and I'm one of the main actors in the film. I've also helped with everything from location scouting to craft services to putting together the wrap party. It's been very rewarding but also really exhausting and even I am not so dense that I can deny why I'm doing it; it's a distraction. It's something for me to focus on that isn't my home life.

When I wasn't working on the movie, I was traveling. I went to LA twice this summer and will be going back in October. I went to Boston for a fundraiser. I go to Dallas every weekend. I've been to Vegas. In the next few months, I'll be in Columbus, Indianapolis, and back in LA. I just can't stand the idea of sitting still, staying in the house all by myself with nowhere to turn that is my own. I've been thinking about the possibility of buying an RV, of moving to LA for a year, of relocating into a fresh start. I'm graduating from college in December and so I'm trying to find out the 'what happens next' part of what I should do once I have that diploma. It's only an associate's so I may continue taking classes online to get a bachelor, but who knows? Everything is up in the air right now for me.

All I know is that I could do anything.

I just can't be afraid to leap.

Fatty Fatty Two-by-Four

It's interesting to me how everyone's self esteem is different; there are people who are perfectly content with their bodies and people who loathe the way they look, and on both ends of that spectrum are people who, to our own eyes, shouldn't feel the way they do.

I was mocked and teased my entire life for my weight; I heard snickers and whispers as I walked by a group of people, many of my friends said incredibly hateful things behind my back, and once when a friend and I were having a heated argument she said "I only keep you around because you make me look that much hotter in comparison." Despite having a family who took every opportunity to tell me that I was beautiful, I never believed it. I had self esteem that was in the gutter and I was insecure about virtually everything in my life. I hid behind being loud and laughing a lot and making jokes, often at my own expense, to cover up how insecure I felt in the shadow of my beautiful friends and the rest of the world. I felt like I had to apologize for who I was.

One of my dearest friends, someone I've always found to be pretty much the epitome of beauty, has had a lifelong weight fluctuation. For a long period of time she lived a life that many people would envy, traveling with celebrities and seeing the world while working a glamorous, high-profile job; in addition to that, every time she would post a photo she'd get hundreds of people gushing over her beauty or calling her adjectives like 'flawless' and 'radiant', myself included. Yet she sent me a message today asking me if I noticed a difference in the way people treated me pre-surgery versus the way I'm treated now, and if it bothered me how intensely people seemed to celebrate it.

And it definitely made me think.

I grew up loathing my body; my mother certainly loathed hers. She was single and never had much luck in the dating department despite her outgoing personality and the fact that everyone who met her loved her. She had a ready laugh, a beautiful smile and a heart of pure gold but men were turned off by the fact that she wore a size 26/28 and bought her clothes at Lane Bryant and couldn't sashay around in miniskirts and high heels at the bar. She was an incredible mother and a great friend, but men came to her to ask her to help hook them up with her more traditionally-attractive friends. She participated in every fad diet of the 80s, 90s and beyond, buying workout tapes and exercise equipment, joining gyms, even hiring a personal trainer. She lost 100 pounds on her own steam the year before she was diagnosed with MS, when a six-month bout of being bedridden caused her to gain it all back and then some. She fought with her body her entire life.

I wasn't as pessimistic about mine at first, and I tried to encourage her to dress younger, to buy rock t-shirts, to dye her hair a more vibrant red, to wear sparkling eyeshadow and paint her fingernails green. I wanted her to let go of that idea that she couldn't be beautiful just because she was big. After all, I was modeling for plus-sized pinup sites. My friends assured me that I was pretty 'for a big girl'. I didn't think that I was ugly even when I was at my heaviest; I was just fat.

Yet in our society, fat is ugly.

I didn't go on a single 'date' in high school, even while my friends went steady and made out with each other on the weekends. Instead, I helped hook them up, was an alibi if they needed to avoid their parents for awhile, or I tagged along and waited awkwardly in a Denny's while they frantically got in their kissing time in the parking lot before curfew. I was set up on a few dates by friends, but they were obligatory and fake and none of them led to anything. It was just guys being nice to get in good graces with my friend, or to repay a favor from something. A boy I knew for years, who I was crazy about, made out with me in secret and then told me that we could never actually 'date' because he couldn't be seen going out with a fat girl. Even though, he assured me, he really liked me.

In college my boyfriend was never like that, but he also has a tendency to date girls on the bigger side because that's his preference. It doesn't diminish how we felt about each other, but it was an important factor in the how we started flirting. If he'd only been into skinny girls, he would've never gotten to know that we both loved reading in bed or making silly jokes or trading mix CDs. 

I went to LA last week and my weight loss was really noticeable to me. But not for the reasons you might think.

LA is a city of beautiful people, and by LA standards (most standards, really) I'm still grossly overweight, obese, undesirable. And yet in LA, this time, I felt more comfortable than I probably ever have. I walked miles up and down the Venice boardwalk with my beautiful friend Stephanie, who is a model and complete eye candy, and I didn't feel self-conscious. I bought several shirts on the boardwalk and never had to ask "What size do these go up to?"; I just found the larges and, in one case, a medium without incident. I didn't have pain in my ankle from walking, and I wasn't drenched in sweat or short of breath despite us walking in bright sunlight in the middle of the day along the shoreline. Steph and I went to restaurants and I didn't have to worry about fitting in the booth without my gut being pressed against the table. We went into stores like Popkiller and I didn't have to stand and study the sunglasses while my skinny friend tried on clothes; au contraire, I was the one who tried on shirts while Steph browsed. 

On the plane, I didn't bulge over the armrest into the lady next to me's territory. I didn't have trouble fastening the seat belt, or dropping my tray table. I didn't have any problems at all. But moreover, when I boarded, a very cute boy helped me get my bag into the overhead compartment. He flashed me a smile. I smiled back and that was the end of it... but I remember boarding that same flight last October at my biggest weight, and I was wrestling with my roller bag because it wouldn't fit down the aisle easily and was too heavy to pick it up. Multiple people sighed, rolled their eyes, looked away from me as I struggled. No one offered to help. Now can I directly tie that to my weight? No. Maybe that day the plane was just full of assholes and this day a nice guy lent a damsel in distress a hand. But maybe not. 

People tend to avoid fat people; we're the last acceptable plague, a blight on humanity. We're not supposed to wear swimsuits where others can see us, or wear shorts if our thighs have cellulite and dimples and flab even if it's a hundred degrees out. It's 'gross' if we buy pretty thong underwear and even the 'big-girl-friendly' stores like Lane Bryant, Torrid and Cato's preach the importance of layering your body in Spanx and girdles before you wiggle into those muumuus because you wouldn't want to offend anyone with your fat. Even in places that are supposed to be friendly, our bodies are the enemy.

While I initially did this for a myriad of reasons, I DO notice that the way even my own friends perceive me is different. I recently went to shoot a band; I've been friends with them for nearly two years but haven't seen them play live in almost a year. I showed up at the show and it was their first time seeing me; both the band and their girlfriends were freaking out about my weight loss, and two individual people--- both well-meaning, and I didn't take it the wrong way--- said "Oh my god, look how hot she is now!" I'll admit, even though I knew they were coming from a sweet place with it, it made my hackles raise a little. When I post photos of my weight loss progress on Facebook, sometimes there are comments like "You're becoming such a beautiful young lady" or "Wow, you're looking amazing these days". I know that people don't mean anything by this, but I think it's another subconscious way of saying fat is bad; this is better. And while it's true--- I feel better, not only physically, but I'm much more confident and less self-conscious than I used to be--- that being more slim and healthy is better than feeling out of sorts with my body the way I used to, I don't like that weight loss is considered synonymous with better or, worse, beautiful. 

I've seen gorgeous people of all sizes, and I happen to find a lot of plus-sized people very attractive. It depends on so much more than the size of your jeans, and I hate the emphasis that people put on the idea of weight loss. We're obsessed with the very nature of it. But if you post something on your Facebook --- "Got on the scale, down 3 pounds!", for example--- just watch how many likes, comments, and accolades you get. We celebrate weight loss because we think that the slimmer someone is, the closer they are to true attractiveness and beauty and worth in our society. That is an epidemic that needs to stop. Weight has nothing to do with beauty, or value. 

I'm learning so much about myself as I see the way the world perceives me changing. 

With every pound I lose, I am gaining perspective. And I just wish I could go back and hug 348-pound me and say You're beautiful now and no matter what, you always will be.

But knowing me, I wouldn't have listened anyway.

What Makes You Beautiful

I have always found beauty in strange places.

When I was a little girl I would look for beauty in the fluffy fur of a kitten my mother was bottlefeeding or in the colorful paint job on my My Little Ponies. Now that I'm older, I see it in the crows' feet around crinkled eyes, in gaps between teeth shown behind slightly-parted lips, in the asymmetrical pattern of freckles. I find it in laughter and casual handshakes and people walking down the street who I will never say hello to.

In part, that appreciation of beauty led to me becoming a photographer. When I was fourteen, I was a freshman in high school and desperate to find somewhere I belonged. A group of kids one year ahead of me in school were into punk and went to all of the local shows. They were incredibly exotic to me, decorated with Sharpie tattoos and Elmer's Glue holding their dyed hair into outrageous spikes; their clothing was colored, safety-pinned, stitched and layered to make Halloween costumes they wore all day every day. I was enamoured with their language, their music, their laughter; we went to the punk shows and crowded up by the stage in sweat-soaked tangles of limbs, groping for one another in the semi-darkness, screaming lyrics we knew and headbutting people who came too close like angry baby goats. We wore thick-soled sneakers and drank from two-liter bottles of generic soda passed among the mosh pit between songs. Somewhere in the mix of that my mother bought me a camera, a Canon 35mm SLR, and I began taking it everywhere. You'd be hard-pressed to find me without that nylon strap slung over one shoulder, lens banging against my hip as I walked through the halls of school or went on weekend-warrior adventures with  my friends. Every Monday I'd walk into the pharmacy and drop off a handful of rolls of used film, then eagerly wait for the pictures to come back in their sticky little envelopes. Photos of everyone laughing, shoving food in their faces, banging on their instruments like the world was going to end. Eventually I graduated to asking friends to model for me; at sixteen we prowled and trespassed in the shadowy bits of my hometown, my friends posing on rusting catwalks or suspension bridges or their own bedspreads. I brought my camera to concerts and angled myself up against the railing, shooting icons, disgusted and discouraged when the developed photos revealed brilliant fuschia blurs of motion. I hadn't yet learned ISO or shutter speed; I was completely self-taught and the first few concerts I shot, I blew it. I saw others taking pictures without a flash so I tried it, then was bewildered when my return was not good at all. Then I shot one entire show with the flash on, trying to make sure my photos came out this time. Except all of those photos were overblown, the lead singer ghost-white, and you could see the streaks of makeup on his neck where he hadn't blended his foundation in well. His chest was red and splotchy with exertion above the V neck of his shirt. No, this wasn't what I wanted either; where were the beautifully-lit, artistic pictures I saw in the magazines and on the websites I adored? What was I doing wrong?

Of course, knowledge comes with research and practice, and slowly I began to develop my skills. By the time I went away to college I felt fairly confident and upgraded to a digital SLR, sure that this would not only be cheaper but would yield better results than my previous endeavors with film. I taught myself using college friends and the beautiful wilderness around our campus in West Virginia; I had whole scrapbooks of pictures of snow, leaves, twigs. I wish they'd turned out better because Mother Nature gave me a beautiful canvas and I just wasn't entirely sure how to capture it properly.

Now I am twenty-seven, and I would never say that I'm a great photographer but I've certainly lucked out and snagged some shots I'm incredibly proud of. Some of my work's been published, and most of it hasn't. Either way, I have quite a bit that I can look at with pride, and that's more than I could've said in high school when I had no idea what an aperture was.

However, one thing has never changed within me; I still find beauty everywhere I look. I am drawn to the unusual, the unique, and the unconventional. I have shot models with perfect bone structure and illicit bodies straight from the cover of adult magazines; I've shot pouting mouths and perfectly-bent wrists and smoldering eyes more times than I care to count. There's something about seeing a camera come out that lends most people to put on a mask and strike a pose.

The models who are the most beautiful to me are the ones who allow their flaws to show and who make them their own. Who refused to see them as 'flaws' and instead labeled them 'assets'. These models make my life so much easier, and together we create art that I'm incredibly proud of.

At my heaviest, I still wanted to be a burlesque dancer. I've watched the art since I was probably fifteen or so and have always envied their fluid grace. Many burlesque dancers are heavier-set girls who mainstream society say shouldn't be in skimpy sequined and beaded outfits, shimmying on a stage. There is a club in LA that I've always wanted to attend; Club Bounce caters to plus-sized women and their admirers, and the idea of a club like that thriving in a city as looks-obsessed as LA makes me so happy.

I was self-conscious growing up and refused to wear anything revealing or sexy; I performed as Frank-n-Furter once in a production of Rocky Horror Picture Show. It took all of my nerve to pull on those thigh-highs and step into those shoes, and when I looked in the mirror I was actually proud of myself for doing it. I made it through the performance and we got an ovation; people loved it. As I was walking out of the theater, I overheard someone make a remark about how 'huge' the Frank was in the cast, and immediately I felt a flood of shame and embarrassment. I had made an asshole of myself in front of a theater full of people. No one wanted to see a girl my size parading around in panties and a garter belt. What had been a fantastic night was ruined in one fell blow.

I am now 230 pounds, the scale holding steady, and I am working out with a trainer and eating right in small portions. I am living life to the fullest; my ankles and knees don't hurt anymore when I walk, and I feel confident and beautiful most of the time. I am still morbidly obese by pretty much any standards on any map, but I don't feel that way. I bought a dress at H&M, which doesn't carry plus sizes, and it fits me wonderfully. I got my hair cut off and for the first time I can see my jawline without having to do a special 'Myspace angle' head tilt to do so. I have some work to do on my body yet, but overall I am in love with the feeling of moving without pain, of fitting into clothes that don't necessarily cover every inch of skin of mine.

This weekend, friends and I went out to a fancy dinner and we dressed up. I shimmied into leggings and high heels, a dress that came from the 'regular'-sized rack at Hot Topic, and a shrug. I felt like a million bucks and kept my head high all night. I didn't feel like the 'fat girl' playing dress-up the way I did when I would try to disguise my body in a dress. I felt beautiful.

And yet.

I came online tonight to find a girl I vaguely know (we met once at a concert over a year ago, and she isn't the kind of person I'm likely to hang out with on my own time) writing a rant on her Facebook feed about how 'pathetic' it is that bigger and older girls get their pictures taken and profess to be 'models', coming up with pinup names for themselves and such. She got defensive when I called her out for being close-minded, but honestly everything about what she had written rubbed me the wrong way. I'm friends with a lot of plus-sized models, actresses and pinup girls. I know big girls who can shake what their mamas gave them better than any 'svelte' girl I've seen. I hire curvy burlesque girls for my birthday parties. As for the 'old' bit, who is she to judge who is 'too old' to be beautiful? My favorite model I've ever shot is in her early forties, a mother, and was laughing for most of the shoot and 'ruining' any chance of making the photos 'sexy' (for the record, the end result was some of the most beautiful and wonderfully natural photos I've ever shot).

In s

In short... I believe everyone is beautiful. I think of all of those years that I was shamed for wearing tank tops or shorts or a bathing suit. I think of the hateful comments made to me in hallways or stores, or worse, the 'well-meaning' comments about my 'pretty face' or asking if I really needed another slice of pizza. My entire life, my family were the only ones who tried to convince me that I was beautiful; everyone else around me delegated me to the role of the fat friend and I adapted accordingly. Now, I am still fat but I am fiercer than I've ever been before. I am all teeth and claws when it comes to defying the beauty standard; we are all models, no matter our size or age or gender or bone structure. We have the right to bare ourselves in front of unblinking lenses and turn the bodies that society critiques into art. We have to own ourselves and tap into that inner beauty or we'll stop noticing it at all.

We are all worthy of being framed. Every roll, stretch mark, freckle, scar, wrinkle, stray hair, crows' foot, bald spot. Every single thing that makes you who you are is your own--- own it, and make it beautiful. Make every moment worthy of a picture. Make every breath art.

Life's too short to worry about people telling you what you are or aren't.